Update: Please be sure to apply at the Google Policy Fellowship website. For the fifth year, Creative Commons will take part in the Google Policy Fellowship program. It’s fantastic to see that Google has expanded the number and diversity of groups involved in the fellowship program. This year there are participating organizations from Africa, Latin…

“… Civile” / umjanedoan / CC BY It’s a fitting start to CC’s second decade as a license steward that we are publishing for comment the third and final draft of version 4.0. This draft has been long in the making, but we think it’s all the better for the extended discussion and drafting period,…

CC recently considered a proposal to rename the NonCommercial license to “Commercial Rights Reserved”, as raised on this list back in December. We have decided not to pursue that proposal, and to leave the name of the license the same. However, there is a possibility of using the “Commercial Rights Reserved” language in messaging and…

Today marks an historic step forward for public access to publicly funded research in the United States. The Fair Access to Science and Technology Research Act (FASTR) was introduced in both the House of Representatives and the Senate. FASTR requires federal agencies with annual extramural research budgets of $100 million or more to provide the…

Faiza Souici / CC BY-SA In keeping with the tradition inaugurated by the third Creative Commons Arab regional meeting (30th June-2nd July, Tunis, 2011), the 2012 fourth annual gathering of the CC Arab communities was marked by a great deal of creative energy and a strong push towards strengthening a sharing culture in the Arab…

An Education Sprint The future of Open is a dynamic landscape, ripe with opportunities to increase civic engagement, literacy, and innovation. Towards this goal, the Science Program at Creative Commons is teaming up with the Open Knowledge Foundation and members of the Open Science Community to facilitate the building of an open online course, an…

In the UK, the House of Commons has asked for feedback on their Open Access Policy. One provision of that policy requires that articles funded through the Research Councils UK (RCUK) must be released under a CC BY license. Last year, CC submitted a short comment in support. And just last month, the House of…

Black Marble – Africa, Europe, and theMiddle EastNASA Goddard Photo and Video / CC BY After nearly two years working with to support our community and forward Creative Commons in Europe, our European Regional Coordinator, Jonas Öberg, will be leaving us at the end of the month. Jonas has been awarded a prestigious fellowship from…

In December, we blogged about a new initiative by journalists called Syria Deeply, a news platform aiming to redesign the user experience of the Syrian conflict through news aggregation, interactive tools, original reporting, and feature stories. To encourage sharing and viral distribution, Syria Deeply licensed everything on its site under Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY).…

PLOS and figshare announced a partnership earlier today that will allow authors publishing in PLOS journals host their data on figshare. The authors would also benefit from the visualization capabilities that figshare provides right in the browser alongside the content. This partnership symbolizes all that is good about a healthy scientific publishing process that is…